As we approach the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and the ferocious Ukrainian response backed by a US-led Western coalition – the question begs us to answer: how is it possible that on February 23, 2022 , virtually no one in the United States argued that it was in our fundamental national interest to enter a proxy war with Russia to prevent it from invading Ukraine, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map in 10 attempts? Yet now, nearly a year later, polls show a strong (albeit slightly declining) American majority in favor of supporting Ukraine with weapons and aid, even if this risks coming into direct conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

It is a sea change in American public opinion. It is surely partly explained by the fact that there are no US fighting forces in Ukraine, so it seems that all we are risking, for now, is weapons and treasure, while the full brunt of the war falls on the Ukrainians.

But there is another explanation, though most Americans are unable to articulate it and many only grudgingly agree.

Deep down, they know that the world we live in today is tilted that way because of American power. This does not mean that we have always used our power wisely, nor that we could have succeeded without allies. But to the extent that we have used our power wisely and in concert with our allies, we have built and protected a liberal world order since 1945 that has benefited us enormously, both economically and geopolitically.

This is an order in which autocratic great powers like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or modern Russia and China they are not free to simply devour their neighbors. And this is an order in which more democracies have been able to flourish than ever before, and in which free markets and open trade have lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in the history of the world. It’s not always perfect, but in a world where perfection is never on the menu, this order has yielded nearly 80 years without a major-power war—the kind of war that can destabilize the entire world.

Maintaining this liberal order is the underlying rationale that led the United States and its NATO allies to help Ukraine reverse Putin’s “marry me or I’ll kill you” invasion, the first such assault by one country in Europe against another since the end of the Second World War.

Now the bad news. During the first year of this war, the United States and its allies had a relatively easy time. We could send arms, aid and intelligence – as well as impose sanctions on Moscow – and the Ukrainians would do the rest, annihilating Putin’s army and pushing his forces back into eastern Ukraine.

I don’t think the second year will be that easy.

It is now clear that Putin has decided to redouble his efforts, mobilizing perhaps as many as 500,000 new soldiers in recent months for a new offensive on the first anniversary of the war. Mass matters in wareven if that mass contains large numbers of mercenaries, convicts and untrained recruits.

Putin is basically telling President Joe Biden: I cannot afford to lose this war and I will pay any price. and I will bear any burden to make sure I walk out of Ukraine with a piece that can justify my losses. And you Gio? What about your European friends? Are you willing to pay any price and bear any burden to maintain your “liberal order”?

This will be scary. And because we’ve had nearly a generation without a great-power war, many people have forgotten what made this long era of great-power peace possible.

While I argued in my 1999 book “Golden Arches Theory” that the massive explosion of global trade, exchange and connectivity played a major role in this unusually peaceful era, I also argued that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden punch: McDonald’s can’t thrive without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.” Someone has to keep order and enforce the rules.

It was the United States, and I think that role will be tested now more than ever by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Are we prepared yet?

A major new book places this challenge in a broader historical context. In “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941,” Brookings Institution historian Robert Kagan argues that whatever isolationist whims Americans may have, the fact remains that, for more than a century, the most of them supported using US power to shape a liberal world order that would keep the world leaning towards open political systems and open markets in more places, in more ways and on more days, enough to keep the world from to turn into a Hobbesian jungle.

I called Kagan and asked him why he sees the war in Ukraine not as something we’ve run into, but rather as a natural extension of this century-old arc of American foreign policy that he’s written about. Kagan’s answers will comfort some and make others uncomfortable, but it’s important to keep this debate alive as we enter the second year of this war.

“In my book,” Kagan said, “I quote Franklin Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address. At a time when American security was in no way threatened — Hitler had not yet invaded Poland and the fall of France was almost impossible to imagine – Roosevelt insisted that, nevertheless, there are times ‘in the affairs of men when they must prepare themselves to defend not only their homes, but the principles of faith and humanity upon which their lives, the churches, their governments and their own civilization.’ In both World Wars and during the Cold War, The Americans did not act in immediate self-defense, but in defense of the liberal world against the challenges of militaristic authoritarian governments, just as they are doing today in Ukraine”.

But why is supporting Ukraine in this war not only in our strategic interest, but also in line with our values?

“Americans continually struggle to reconcile conflicting interpretations of their interests: one focused on national security and one focused on defending the liberal world beyond America’s shores,” he said. “The former is in keeping with Americans’ preference to be left alone and avoid the costs, responsibilities, and moral burdens of exercising power abroad. The latter reflects their fears as liberal people of becoming what FDR called “a lonely island in a sea of ​​militaristic dictatorships. The oscillation between these two perspectives has produced the recurring whiplash of American foreign policy over the last century”.

International relations theorists, added Kagan, “have taught us to see ‘interests’ and ‘values’ as something different, with the idea that for all nations, ‘interests’ – i.e. material concerns such as security and economic well-being – necessarily take precedence over values. But, in reality, that is not how nations behave. the expansion of NATO. However, Putin has been willing to make Russia less safe to satisfy traditional Russian great-power ambitions, which have more to do with honor and identity than with security. The same appears to apply to Chinese President Xi Jinping when it comes to retaking Taiwan.

Interestingly, however, a growing number of Republicans, at least in the House of Representatives and on Fox News, don’t buy into this argument, while a Democratic president and his Senate do. Why?

“Debates about American foreign policy are never just about foreign policy,” Kagan replied. “THE ‘isolationists’ of the 1930s were predominantly Republican. Their greatest fear, or so they said, was that FDR was leading the nation toward communism. In international affairs, therefore, they tended to be more sympathetic to the fascist powers than to the Liberal Democrats. They thought highly of Mussolini, objected to aiding Spanish republicans against the Nazi-backed fascist Franco, and viewed Hitler as a useful bulwark against the Soviet Union.

“AS it is not so surprising today that so many conservative Republicans have a soft spot for Putin, whom they consider a leader of the global anti-liberal crusade. Perhaps it is worth reminding Kevin McCarthy that Republicans were politically destroyed by their opposition to World War II and could only be resurrected by electing an internationalist Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.”

But there are also many voices on the left who legitimately ask: Is it really worth risking WW3 to drive Russia out of eastern Ukraine? Haven’t we already done so much damage to Putin that he won’t try something like Ukraine again anytime soon? Is it time for a dirty deal?

As I suspect this question will be the focus of our foreign policy debate in 2023, I asked Kagan to initiate it.

“Any negotiations that leave Russian forces on Ukrainian soil will only be a temporary respite before Putin’s next attempt,” he said. “Putin is in the process of fully militarizing Russian society, just like Stalin did during WWII. He will be in it for the long haul and counts on the United States and the West to tire us of the prospect of a protracted conflict, as isolationists on the left and right at the Quincy Institute and in Congress have already pointed out.”

“That the United States is flawed and sometimes uses its power recklessly is not arguable. But if you can’t address head-on the question of what would happen to the world if the United States stands by, then you are not seriously addressing these issues.” tough questions.”

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